How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of the New York Times best seller The Singularity Is Near, is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Sapiens

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us sapiens? In this bold and provocative audiobook, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here, and where we're going.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions of people. This book is an antidote to pessimism by tech-entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

Surviving AI is a concise, easy guide to what's coming, taking you through technological unemployment (the economic singularity) and the possible creation of a superintelligence (the technological singularity).

On Intelligence

Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.

Ten years from today, the center of our digital lives will no longer be the smart phone, but device that looks like ordinary eyeglasses: except those glasses will have settings for virtual and augmented reality. What you really see and what is computer generated will be mixed so tightly together, that we won't really be able to tell what is real and what is illusion.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving, in this groundbreaking book in the vein of Daniel Pink's Drive and Charles Duhigg's Smarter Faster Better.

Exponential Organizations: New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It)

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work.

Man's Search for Meaning

Internationally renowned psychiatrist, Viktor E. Frankl, endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps. During, and partly because of his suffering, Dr. Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy. At the core of his theory is the belief that man's primary motivational force is his search for meaning.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Publisher's Summary

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today - the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development. As such, it offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

I know not everyone will love the book, but I did and I know some others will too. Usually I don't like predictions about the future since the future is so hard to see accurately but I think Kurzweil does such an outstanding job. If statements like the universe will become self aware one day after man biologically merges with our thinking machines bother you, you probably shouldn't bother with this book, but if such statements excite you the book could be worth your trouble.

Listening to this book brought back memories of 5-6th grade reel-to-reel science/biology films; you know the ones that were impossible to stay awake through even if you were interested in the subject.The Narrators voice is extremely monotone and the book is written in almost a textbook manner.The Ideas and information are very interesting, but it's the worst audio book I have ever listened to.

There seems to be two types of people reading and rating this book, the true believers and the skeptics, but very little has been said on the overal enjoyment of the book. First this is a great concept, the idea that through the law of accelerating returns we are getting closer to a singularity, or a massive explosion in technological advancement that will literally combine humans and technology is truly amazing, and if your a tech buff that grew up dreaming of a holodeck this idea is right up your ally. Unfortunately the right person came up with the idea and the wrong person wrote about it. I think Ray is a fascinating human being and true genius, his career speaks for itself and his intelligent and quirky approach to life and health is a book in itself, but I found the book boring. Actually beyond boring because I am only a third of the way through and had to force myself to this point. I wanted to wait and finish before writing a review, but the umpteenth time he through out some computation or algorithmic equation I lost him, he's a scientist and I get it, but the read is a slow boring walk through mathematics which tries to prove ideas that are fascinating with literal repeated boring facts. I get it, if you tell me the rate on return of technology is increasing and technology is building on itself to make itself smarter I understand, to then go into equation after equation explaining why is just boring, save it for the Scientific American. It's if Ray wanted to prove to his skeptics on his ideas and wrote a Scientific Paper that he later edited for the layman for mass production. I will still read everything about Ray Kurzweil, I just don't know if I am going to read anything from Ray Kurzweil. Great guy, Great Idea, Boring Book.

Kurzweil repeatedly flogs the same minor points over and over about how powerful PCs will be in just a few years. I get that they will be 10 to the umpteenth times as powerful as the human brain. I don't need to hear it for what seems like to be every other paragraph in the book.

What did you like best about this story?

It was nice to see some hard numbers on the subject (though it would have been better to then moved on from those numbers, rather than constantly revisiting them).

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of George K. Wilson?

Frankly, anyone could have done a better job than Mr. Wilson. He has a weird intonation to his voice as he reads the book, which is reminiscent of William Shatner at his worst, played at a very slow speed. I found that playing it at twice normal speed helped things immensely.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Singularity Is Near?

Each chapter begins with a future version of Kurzweil discussing with other supposed future individuals what life was like after the singularity occurs (in 2045). This reads more like a Mary Sue piece than anything else and does more harm than good to the work.

Any additional comments?

Spoiler alert! The future Kurzweil projects for humanity is that sometime between 2045 and 2100 we all turn into a cross between the Borg, a T1000 Terminator (minus the desire to kill all humans), and V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Kurzweil sees this as a positive, even though such a scenario involves government mandated brain scans (to make sure we're not developing WMDs, and Kurzweil assures us that the government will never ever abuse this power in the way Nixon did). Frankly, while I like the idea of near immortality, and many of the technological advances which seem likely, I think that if what Kurzweil projects comes to pass, the future will be incredibly bleak.

Don't miss out on this book. It should start out with "Y'all ain't gonna believe this s _ _ _!"

What a wild and jaw-dropping read! Ray Kurzwell is a real visionary, and the array of subject matter contained in this book is awesome. I can hardly believe his ideas about the future of mankind and artifical intelligence. Though my back aches and my arthritis is killing me, Kurzwell makes me want to live another seventy-one years just to see if what he says turns out to be true. i can only hope that his vision of the future becomes reality so that my great-grandchildren can witness and benefit from the fantastic future outlined in his book.

Kurzwell's views on robotics and artificial intelligence, cloning, reverse-engineering the human brain (?), nanotechnology, world hunger, immortality, conquest of the Universe, treating diabetes successfully (to mention just a few topics) are logically presented, and carefully explained in layman's terms. I have listened to this book several (like seven or eight) times and it has not lost my interest yet. I love the book. I agree with the reviewer who states that it is a great introduction to the 21st century and the vast changes that are iminently possible for mankind. Wow.

The narrator is exactly as he should be. He speaks slowly enough for me to digest the material. His tone is pleasant, and he speaks as if he knows the material well. I am a stickler for narration. it's something that I often comment on, and frankly I was surprised that so many other reviewers panned his performance.

This book is super. While I think he gives the impression that everything that can happen that is beneficial to humanity will happen, which is proving to be incorrect six years after publication. He discusses a lot of fundemental questions, its not a science fiction novel full of action and adventure, but it is excellent heavy duty, educated, food, for thought if you want to think about the future and what it could, in theory be. Additional note, you do need an education to listen to this book and not have it go over your head. I have a third level education but I only just managed to understand it, I think I will listen to it twice.

This could be one of the most important books to be written in the first 10 years of the 21st millennium. It does get technical at times, however, the main points are SO important that it's not vital that one understand all the technical info. These theories give our race (the human race) new hope in many areas that I personally felt hopeless about before hearing the opinions and theories of Dr. Kurzweil. He may not be right about everything, but his track record has been excellent. This is not a "quack." They don't put quacks on the cover of 'TIME'! GET THIS ONE!

In a period of ever accelerating technological and cultural change, Ray Kurzweil provides a schematic structure that articulates the ideas that so many have intuitively sensed about the epochal impact of technology on the development of human knowledge and humanity itself. With almost mystical fervor, Kurzweil sets forth a vision of the future in which technology and humanity merge and the bounds of human knowledge explode as humanity is unbound from the limits of very slow biological information processing. The result will be a rise of intelligent machines which retain elements of humanity, and of humans who have enhanced and extended their abilities by taking advantage of technological augmentation of their minds.

The scope of Kurzweil's vision is breathtaking - be sure to go to Tantor's publisher site to download and view the figures and illustrations mentioned in the text.

The content of the book is breathtaking, and looks into an infinite future.

The narration is the polar opposite of the content. George K. Wilson's stilted style is almost ironically ill-suited to such a forward looking book. Imagine the work of a futurist as it might have been heard on a World War II-era radio. Wilson seems to be trying for the authoritative pronouncment of a Cronkite or a Murrow. Wilson's style of narration is wholly unsuited to the audiobook format generally and does particular violence to this book. Tantor Audio, what were you thinking?

The book content gets five stars, but the narration is so bad that this audiobook is almost unendurable.